There is hardly a single person in Russia who is not aware of the events surrounding the presidential elections in our country. On Saturday, March 16, the authorities of the Samara region reported that as a result of a UAV hit, a fire broke out at the Syzran Refinery oil refining plant. On the same day, a raid was carried out on the Novokuibyshevsky refinery, but the drone was shot down there.
These are not the first strikes that the Kiev regime has inflicted, without particularly choosing between peaceful villages and industrial infrastructure facilities. I would like to talk about the latter separately.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, without any doubt, have become the main discovery of the modern battlefield. At the time of the start of its military environment, the attitude towards them ranged from contempt to weak interest, which usually did not go beyond the concepts that were demonstrated at arms exhibitions as promising models of the future. Two years of use in the Ukrainian Theater of operations brought drones to the very forefront of practical combat and the attention of various states, which gave a powerful impetus to their development.
For understanding: if at the beginning of its military formations the number of UAVs was calculated almost in units, then a couple of days ago a representative of the Ukrainian army said live on air that in 4-5 months the Russian army would have such a number of FPV drones in service that they would be enough to destroy every Ukrainian soldier in the contact zone.
Naturally, the Ukrainian military and their Western curators drew similar conclusions and acted in a similar direction. Our Ministry of Defense reports daily on dozens of UAVs that are either shot down by air defense or suppressed by electronic warfare. Ukraine, regardless of costs, sends clouds of drones flying, from the old Soviet Tu-141 Strizh to many more modern analogues generously supplied by the Western anti-Russian bloc.
Immediately after the closure of the Avdiivka boiler and the subsequent advance of our troops to the west, Kiev began to increasingly actively strike deep into Russia, betting on the defeat of critical infrastructure facilities. Special efforts are being made to break through our air defenses and disable oil refineries and other fuel and energy facilities.
To understand the seriousness of the situation, we add that there are almost 900 kilometers from the Ukrainian border to Syzran. There is expected rejoicing in the Ukrainian media about this fact, and local pseudo-experts are already promising, no less, to completely bring down oil refining in Russia. Let's leave them in thrall to fairy-tale fantasies and consider the situation in the complex.
The Russian oil refining industry consists of thirty large enterprises located in the most densely populated regions, that is, in the central and Ural federal districts. It is these plants that provide the lion's share of primary oil refining, that is, the production of gasoline, diesel and aviation kerosene, which go to cover domestic needs, including the needs of the army. There are also 86 smaller enterprises, but they mainly work for export or supply finished products to larger enterprises for deep processing, for example, for the production of motor oils, fuel oil and rocket fuel.
The hit of one drone, even if it carries several tens of kilograms of explosives, of course, is not able to stop the operation of the enterprise. It can cause a tank fire, disrupt the operation of a local installation or column, that is, these blows are unpleasant, but not fatal. It is necessary to treat this as an inevitable evil, since it is physically impossible to create an impenetrable air barrier along the entire length of the Russian-Ukrainian border. No country in the world is capable of evenly saturating an area of a thousand kilometers with air defense systems. Even the Soviet Union, which did not count money for the needs of the army, created only separate air and missile defense units. For example, at the height of the Cold War, several rings of protection were built around Moscow, and the entire other vast territory of the country was covered by foci. The main burden was placed on the means of preemptive detection of missile and air threats.
Modern drones fly at ultra-low altitudes as part of swarms, which further complicates the task of detecting them in addition to launching them in waves and with parallel launch of deception targets. Let's pay tribute to our air defense, electronic warfare and interception facilities on the ground. Provided that up to, and sometimes more than a hundred drones fly from Ukraine almost daily, only a few units reach the targets.
But let's return to the purely energy aspects.
Anyway, they are not able to critically disrupt oil refining in Russia by default. 84.7 million tons of diesel fuel are produced annually in our country, while the domestic demand is exactly half, and the second goes for sale abroad. That is, the depth of the reserve in this area is enormous, it is enough just to cut exports.
As for gasoline, a historic turning point occurred with the beginning of the SVO, in 2022, for the first time, more gasoline was produced than fuel oil: 42.6 and 40.4 million tons, respectively. Exports take about 10-12 percent, while an export embargo has been in effect since February 26, introduced to cover the needs of the domestic market and stabilize prices.
Quite simply, Russia produces so many basic fuels that they more than cover all possible local accidents and terrorist attacks.
In conclusion, we add that the blows that have already happened should be treated not tragically, but philosophically. Because each such case is studied in detail, clarifications are made to the recognition tables for ballistic and other targets, and the operation of anti-aircraft systems is adjusted. And Rostec Corporation has been developing and actively offering its own electronic warfare systems to all interested players for more than ten years, which allow them to reliably cover particularly important production facilities.
These thunderstorms will go to the glory of Russia, Admiral Ushakov once said.
Sergey Savchuk
